Sunday Mornin' Coming Down

In which, the Party of God jumps the shark, the Pundit Caste jumps ship, and like the sacrificial sidekick on a Vice Presidential canned hunt, Republicans get shot in their lying faces.

Over and over and over again.

Good times. Good times.

And remember, all quotes are either my best approximation based on my state of relative blear and sloth-slow typing speed, or just made up entirely.

Uh, I mean “composited and representative of characters and occurrences have been added for dramatic purposes. Also sauteed in a little butter, garlic and time compression for flavor.”

On Meet the Press -- Missouri Senate Race: Senator Jim Talent debates State Auditor Claire McCaskill.

And I took a pass.

Woodward was there to talk about "State of Denial", but lets face facts. If you are a Conservative, odds are you shot your teevee weeks ago, and if you’re a Normal Person, you already know it is positively raining anchors and cinderblocks on the GOP.



On This Week… Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-NY, and Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill.

Also James Baker auditions for Rummy's job.

Tom Reynolds was scheduled to join the battle to defend GOP Pedophilia but pussed out, presumably because Rent-A-Gamin could not provide him with enough children – on a Sunday and on short notice --



-- behind which he could cower.

Or perhaps because the “This Week…” studio space was not sufficient to accommodate a prepubescent wall of flesh large enough to shield Reynolds from direct questions about his complicity in this tragic freak show.


So the job of carrying of the GOP’s dirty water was left to featherweight Adam Putnam (R - FL).

Emanuel does what he does best: Lace up the Bobby Kennedy gloves and work the body until his opponent is coughing up arterial blood.

Stephanopoulos: (Tossing Rahm a fat slow one across the plate) Some say this may have been a Democratic Dirty trick. That you all held onto these emails until just before the election.

Emanuel: Never saw them. Never heard of them until this story broke on ABC. This is a Republican scandal. A Republican cover-up. The Republicans control every fucking inch of this government and have deliberately cut the Dems out of every decision and every conference. This is a steaming pile Republican dirty laundry that they are trying to throw into the Dems back yard.

Emanuel: You cocksuckers have been in power since ’94. Remember your “Contract with America”? Remember all those promises you made about fiscal responsibility? About cleaning up corruption? About changing the “culture” in D.C. ? Well you have failed. Failed utterly. You are in breach of that Contract.

On the Roundtable -- George Will, Cokie Roberts, Fareed Zakaria, David Corn.

Shorter Roundtable: Sure we can change the subject. Wanna talk about something more important? Ok, lets talk about something more important.

Hey, how about Iraq? Because Iraq is fucked.

After 300 billion dollars, Republican Senator Warner reports that a dangerously pressing problem in Iraq is food and fresh water.

Pause while that sinks in. Three years, hundreds of billions spent, thousands dead, and a lack of “food and fresh water” are among the uppermost problems in Iraq.

But hey, let ‘em eat flowers and chocolate I suppose.

David Corn: We can’t have a serious policy discussion in this country about Iraq.

Cokie: I do think the conversation can start after this election.

Which election? The last one? The one before that? The next one? Cokie is an inveterate and invertebrate whore, but we do at least have a new piece of time-reference terminology.

The “cokie”: an interval of 30-days, after which one can begin thinking about maybe discussing establishing a committee to start a preliminary conversation about maybe tweaking some stuff.

After the election.

For those keeping score at home, a “cokie” is 1/2 1/6 of a “friedman”

Corn: There is a serious question as to whether this Administration can ever have this conversation.

And the reason is simple. George Bush is a delusional coward, megalomaniac and liar, who will reliably tell more lethal untruths, reliably call everyone who wants to have an adult discussion about the problem a traitor, and predictably choose to pimp fear and play cheap politics with the lives and futures of the American people.

Every. Single. Time.



On Face the Nation -- Rep. Tom Davis (R-Virginia) Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Illinois) Dan Balz, National Political Correspondent, The Washington Post

Bad news for Republicans.

Bad news bread and butter.

Bad news for the salad.

Bad news for the main course.

Bad news for dessert.

Imported stinky bad news cheese and port.

And would you care for mo’ bad news with your coffee?



The Chris Matthews Show -- Maureen Dowd, Andrew Sullivan, Norah O'Donnell and
Tucker Carlson

Sully: You cannot have the “Leave us alone” coalition of small government exist side-by-side with the Conservative Evangelicals.

driftglass: Well D-Fucking-uh! When did that epiphany come fluttering down to you from Heaven. Because the rest of us have been hip to that little matter for, oh, about the last 25 years. And if it has taken you a quarter of a century to catch up on what was self-evident to the Smart Kids in 1980, what in the fuck are you doing posturing as an honored, card-carrying member of the in-the-know Punditocracy?

Carlson: This Preznit has had a very aggressive outreach to gays.

Sully: Are you kidding me!

Matthews: What, was I imagining things? It was Gay Marriage that drove the million of Conservative Evangelical voters to the polls. Sweet Jebus, Calrson. It was whuppin’ on the queers that won them the GOP last election!

Sully: And lets not forget the hypocrisy. Foley’s predilections were well known ten years ago.

Dowd: It is disorienting that the Republicans are becoming the Party of Gays, and weak on defense. But electionwise, women get this.

Carlson: The elites in the Republican party have nothing but contempt for the Evangelicals.

Matthews: And you know this how?

Carlson: Because I grew up with them. I live next to them. I've done whole kilos of coke off their daughter’s asses. They think the Evangelicals are idiots and have been chumping them for decades.

And now, the Base is sloooowly beginning to figure it out. And they’re pissed.

Sully: They have every right to be pissed. They’ve been duped by the GOP and now they are angry.

driftglass: Well D-Fucking-uh, again. And again. And yet again. Who are you Muppets? And how do I get paid top dollar for being wrong, in loud, declarative sentences, year after year after year?

Dowd: Well these guys never take responsibility for anything. From Foley to Iraq they never step-up. Oh, and Bush is delusional.

Sully: Conservativism used to be an empirically based belief. You looked at reality and then acted accordingly. Bush’s Fundamentalist psyche does not allow him to do that. When reality conflicts with his beliefs he just retreats into delusion. And he can’t change, because to admit he might be mistaken would be to admit he does not know what he is doing.

driftglass: And then his widdle head would explode like a nekkid Coelacanth in interstellar space.

Sully: I mean, in what sane universe is Rumsfeld still there?

Carlson: I think we are all complicit in this war. The ideological underpinning of this war – that we can RPG Democracy into the soil of the Middle East (ok, I said that, not Little Boy Dance-o-matic) – is ridiculous.

driftglass: Fuck you, you squirmy little weed. About 49 million Americans were in no way complicit. Were in no way duped. They are called “Democrats”, and your scummy fellow-travelers on the Right – from the sewers of Hate Radio to the halls of the White House -- called us all traitors, loud and long, as we desperately tried to sound the alarm.

Matthews: Not all of us.

Sully: We were told that we were facing a mortal threat to our lives and our country. Shit, we didn’t have the intel. We trusted the President and he betrayed us.

And we have the “Sniffing Hillary’s Panties” portion of the show, and all I can say is letting Noron warm a chair was not worth the opportunity cost of acing our whatever smart, trenchant commenter Matthews might have gotten have he not settled for a brunette piñata in a tight sweater.

Carlson: Hillary will be ferocious. She’ll be starting wars left and right.

Sully: Everyone knew about Foley, going back to 1994-1995. And if the Republican Leadership didn’t, they really, really should have.



Fox News -- The King of the Sunday Mouse Circus sponsors one of the biggest Conservative Circle jerks in recent prime time teevee history. Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga. Laura Ingraham, host of the Laura Ingraham Show; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, and David Bossie, president of Citizens United.

Token Democrat - Marty Meehan.

Or, as a friend of mine once said, “My, my, my. The things you see when you don’t have a helicopter gunship.”

Shorter Kingston: Hastert rulz! Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi refuse to go under oath! SorosSorosSorosSoros. Democrats should put child safety ahead of politics, and not use this for political advantage.

Even Wallace is momentarily floored by the sheer brazen volume of the bullshit this punk is slinging.

Wallace: WTF do Emmanuel and Pelosi have to do anything? Even if this was some kind of “Democratic dirty trick”, isn’t it a good thing that Foley got kicked.

Then his dip-switches are reset, and Wallace obediently shifts back to true form: Gerry Studds! Gerry Studds!


Meehan: Yeah, we had a response to Studds. And Republican Phil Crane, who everyone on the Right seems to forget was also ass-deep in page-scandal at that time. The Congress set up a system for protecting pages, and that’s the system that the GOP has subverted to protect a predator in their midst.

Ingraham: Dems overplaying this. People are getting tired of this. GOP needs to get off the defensive.

Bossie: Hastert has failed. The American people want to move forward. We have heavily invested in Conservative Candidates.

Shorter Bossie:

'My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!
Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats!
Justice! the law! my ducats, and my daughter!

Perkins: It is premature to talk about resignations. Is there a network of gay staffers who subverted the investigation. Has the Big Tent led to this party being a Three Ring Circus.

Ingraham: Republicans need to get back on-message. Gotta get back to “substance”.

Ingraham: The Dinosaur Media likes this story because it is titillating and because they don't want to talk about important things. Like the Dow. And Torture. And a big fence.

Bossie: My supporters are the base of this Party. They’re asking, are we going to let the wild-eyed Leftists take over? Let the crazies take over the asylum??

So, to sum up on the Conservative Messages to American Families are:

Ingraham: A Republican sexual predator using his office to stalk children – and Republicans covering up for it – isn’t “substantive”.

Perkins: The only thing we have to Fear is Queer itself.

Bossie: I see Stupid People. Hell, I breed Stupid People. In fact, they pay my salary.

Meehan, BTW, didn’t need to rise to any heights of rhetorical dazzle. Just a simple, clear recitation of the facts and the timeline is enough to make the slandering perfidites on the Right squirm like the Devil chained face down in a Holy Water hot tub.

The Truth! It Burns!

And now, brunch awaits.